Saturday, May 30, 2015

When the Southern Californian,
abstract painter Patrick
Wilson makes a painting he allows the narrative to take care of itself as
he plays to his strengths of color and composition.

As he told the Long
Beach Post’s Sander Roscoe Wolff “I’m much more interested in 'art that is' than 'art
that is about.' I’d rather eat the meal than the menu. I don’t want to tell
people what to think, or what I think. I would much rather set up the situation
where they can experience these paintings and come away with their own unique
take. It’s sort of like a meal. I don’t want to over analyze the meal. I want
to consume it, and take great pleasure in it. I want the work to be generous.”

And
generous is an apt description to apply to Wilson’s multi-faceted arrangements
of squares and rectangles that not only interact within a work but often with the
neighboring pieces.

“It
takes about six to eight weeks to complete a painting, so I have to work on
four or five paintings at once. The other reason that’s important is because
ideas can open up in one painting that’s in progress and lead me to rethink how
I am working on another painting. That is part of my process that keeps these
works evolving. Also, another interesting thing that happens fairly often when
I’m working on multiple paintings at the same time is that they tend to become
like brothers and sisters or cousins. There are little connections between
things, whether its color or proportions, that make them more interesting in a
grouping when they are exhibited,” he explained.

This
interaction is assisted by the works being geographically specific, as he says “You
can see hints of where I live. There’s no doubt about the sensation of light
and haze and smog that is so unique to Los Angeles. Many painters and many
artists have talked about this in the past. It's all in there. The paintings
feel like Southern California. To me, I don’t think these could be made in San
Francisco, or in New York. I don’t think they would look the same.”

Wilson’s
works also express his reaction to the world of Big Macs & 140 character
messages. In the publicity for
his 2009 exhibition Slow Food, Wilson
said “In a
culture obsessed with speed and abbreviation over all else, we are becoming
less and less willing to spend time considering anything containing more
information than 140 characters. I hope that this new body of work is a
counterbalance to that way of thinking; slow, complex, unpredictable and beautiful.”

Wilson
has found his niche in the art world and is reveling in the experience. As he
has said “It’s
a great place to be. I’m thrilled with the way things are currently working
out, not only the fact that a number of people are getting to enjoy the work in
different venues, in museums and very good galleries, but also that I’m getting
to basically live and work in exactly the way I’d always hoped, which is in the
studio, full time. I couldn't ask for much more than that. It’s what I love to
do, and it’s been that way now for quite a number of years.”

Wilson’s latest exhibition of new paintings is currently
on show at New York’s Ameringer | McEnery
| YoheGallery until the 3rd of July.

Friday, May 29, 2015

Described as “the master of the stick figure” British artist
Julian Opie likes to make things as simple and as easy as possible.

As he told dazeddigital.com’sJohn-Paul
Pryor “You know
there is a tendency to feel that in order for something to be important that
it's got to be difficult, and I tend to go the other way. My instincts are
always to do what’s easiest – that’s just a rule that I follow and it means
that you often end up making things that some people, and even I myself can
feel a little dubious about. When people find out that I use photography as the
basis for my portraits you can see that they feel a slight sense of
disappointment, but frankly a photograph makes it a hell of a lot easier and we
all know that the Dutch painters in the 17th century used the Camera Obscura
when they could. So what I found, after a while, was that mimicking the
computer look was a lot easier by simply using a computer. So I kind of taught
myself vector drawing, and the way that works is via a process of cut and
build, cut and build – you put pieces of rope around something, and you can
make it thicker or darker, then you fill it with color – it’s a constructive
Lego-type system of drawing.”

Universally known
as the artist who reduces reality to outlines filled with color Opie
appropriates the signage of flat pack furniture instructions for his landscapes
whilst his figures look like they have stepped off toilet doors. For as he
explained to the Guardian
NewspapersDominic
Murphy "People are very suspicious
once they know something is art. I wanted to defuse that moment of suspicion so
that people are given the chance to enter the work visually before worrying
about whether it is art or whether they are supposed to like it."

Working across painting, sculpture and computer art Opie
brings the everyday and its inhabitants into the gallery. As he told Today’s
Zaman “I can only work on [real]
people. I can’t just imagine them. These are people that I know. I can only
work with contemporary people, not dead people. It is inevitable that everybody
I draw has a contemporary feeling. I also think that it would be strange not to
draw the world around you because this is the world I know. I don’t like
idealization, such as in the ancient sculptures of gods. I like realistic
[depictions]; [they’re] more exciting, more mysterious.

And as for the use of computers in his work, Opie has said “Art is always technology. Even if you put
paint on [your] mouth and blew like they did 20,000 years ago, that’s
technology. The trick is to do something good with it. I use both my hand and
the computer. I don’t think one is better than the other.”

Thursday, May 28, 2015

“He must be an artist. He
knows a good painting when he sees it."Horace Pippin

It took the
self-taught African American folk artist Horace Pippin three years
to complete his first oil painting. He had returned from the First World War
with a steel plate in his right shoulder which left his arm virtually paralysed.
Using his good left hand to support his right arm at the wrist Pippen was able
to guide it across the canvas.

This first
painting The
End of War: Starting home was a
cathartic work which along with several others Pippen exorcised the horror of
the trenches and launched his artistic career. As he wrote “When I was a boy I loved
to make pictures, [but war] brought out all the art in me. . . . I can never
forget suffering and I will never forget sunsets. So I came home with all of it
in my mind and I paint from it today.”

Four
years later the artist NC Wyeth saw two of Pippins paintings in a shoe repair
shop window. He was so taken by the works that he organised for Pippen to be
the first African American artist to be shown in the annual Chester County Art
Association'sexhibition. A solo
exhibition followed and a year later four of Pippen’s works were included in the
Museum of Modern Art’s 1938 exhibition "Masters of Popular
Painting."

Around
this time the founder of the Barnes Foundation, Dr. Albert C. Barnes,
became interested in Pippen’s work and became its champion, writing essays about
and purchasing the artist’s works which still hang today amongst Barnes’ collection
of Cézanne’s, Matisse’s and Renoir’s.

Whilst
Pippen’s war paintings were the catalyst for his career it was his scenes of
African American domesticity and his works inspired by the social-political historical
injustices visited upon his people that cemented his place in annals American
art.

Variously
described by the critics of the day as a primitive/naïve artist, Pippen was a
man who knew his own mind. As on the occasion when Dr. Barnes offered critical painting
suggestions Pippen is reported to have replied "Do I tell you how
to run your foundation? Don't tell me how to paint."

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

“It was the loss of the palette, not of the easel,
that changed the face of what we see as painting.”
Frank Stella

Although famed for his quote “What you see is what you see” there is
more to the art of painting than what engages the eye according to American
abstract painter Frank
Stella. As he told Bomb Magazine’sSaul Ostrow, “No
art is any good unless you can feel how it’s put together. By and large it’s
the eye, the hand and if it’s any good, you feel the body. Most of the best
stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist’s body; you
can really lean on it.”

And
so it was with the first of the Black Paintings that were to make the Stella
name. He was in his early 20’s and recently resident in New York, attracted by
the cream of the abstract expressionists in the late 1950’s whose style had him
in their thrall.

As
he told the London’s Telegraph
Newspaper’sAlastair Sooke “I was working on a
particular painting, (calledDelta), and I
remember I got mad at it. So I painted over it, and went to bed. When I looked
at it the next day, it didn't look that bad. All I'd done was simplify it by
painting out the bands all black. But something was happening. It had a kind of
presence. That was the beginning.”

A
year later Stella had a series of these “large, aggressive canvases covered
with stripes of black enamel paint that formed repetitive, rippling patterns.” Of which four were included the Museum of Modern
Art’s 1959 exhibition Important Sixteen Americans.

Over
the ensuing decades Stella’s stripes gave way to complex geometric designs, shaped
canvases and works on aluminium to sculptures of architectural size. Along the
way he has maintained that early gained recognition with exhibitions in prestigious
galleries and museums and prices to match.

But
it is the gesture within the painting that intrigues and goes a long way in determining
its value as art for Stella. As the New York Times reported his saying during
his Harvard University’s Charles Eliot
Norton lecturer“The life
of what one drops the brush into counts for more than the size of what one
paints on. The load of paint carried, more than the dimensions of the area to
be covered, determines the scale of the gesture.”

An exhibition of his work Frank Stella – Paintings & Drawings is currently on show at The Kunstmuseum Basel until the 30th of
August.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

“I have learned from
the past and shaped my own artistic practice.”Mohammad Bozorgi

The Iranian calligraphy artist Mohammad Bozorgi’s ambition is to create
his own language. As he states on his website “My desire is to create a new
language, one that is based in traditional Persian and Arabic forms but
communicates through abstraction.”

About which he elaborates, saying ‘Writing for me is the
beauty and grandeur of a noble sense which without doubt refers to my cultural
emotions and my intellectual and mental structure of calligraphy and religious
faith. Although the public observers of today’s calligraphy do not believe in
the historic purity of it; however my attempt whether successful or not is to
reach to a certain source of purity.”

Bozorgi started studying traditional calligraphy in his
early teens at summer courses in the subject and over the ensuing 15 years he
studied 18 classical calligraphy forms of which he mastered 10 and in 2009 was
awarded Momtaz (Outstanding/excellent) Degrees from the Calligraphy Association
of Iran. Along the way Bozorgi picked up a BA in Biomedical Engineering and a
MBA Degree from the Industrial Management Institute of Tehran.

He eventually broke ranks with the traditionalists for being,
well, traditionalists, as he says “I stopped my collaboration and training with
the Society because I found they were too restrictive and did not allow any
innovation to the calligraphic forms with which they were working.”

As he explained to the Project
Gallery Cap-Ferrat “After all these classical practices, I started to work
with canvases, colours and other materials, I studied graphic and was really
keen to try new things, just like now. I have no fear to deform the letters,
similar to a child playing with kid’s clay! Unlike many other calligraphers, I
prefer to suffuse my canvas from letters, as Jackson Pollock did by colours. I
am living with words and letters, they are dynamic in my works and frames
cannot restrict their motion.”

Today Bozorgi combines the aesthetics of contemporary
painting with the abstraction inherent in the textual base of Islamic art.

As the publicity for his current exhibition states “Combining
the illusionistic, multidimensional perspective of Op art with the intricate
symmetry and pictorial invention of Islamic manuscripts, Bozorgi creates
compositions that appear to palpitate as Arabic and Persian texts are freed
from linear orientation. Morphing into fluid forms that float, swarm, or rotate
across the canvas, the semiotic meaning of the artist’s calligraphy changes as
it seems to go beyond its original realm of spirituality with allusions to
material subjects and realities, bringing the sacred domain of devotion closer
to perceptual experience.”

Bozorgi’s current exhibition Against the Darkness is on show at Ayyam’s Dubai
Gallery until the 25th of August.

Monday, May 25, 2015

Justin Mortimer was 21 and
still a student at London’s Slade School of Art when he won the National Gallery'sBP Portrait Award with a painting of the Nobel Prize
winning writer Harold Pinter. As Mortimer reminisced to Artlyist’s
Paul Black some 22 years later “I was very young when I won that prize; much
more a craftsman than intuitive artist. Painting anything realistically was
very hard for me so a likeness was an achievement in itself. Content was a
matter of fluke. Now being twice as old as I was then, I'm less bothered with
technique and far more interested in the story and psychological possibilities
of the picture.”

Today Mortimer’s art invites
the viewer to question the relationships between the figurative and the abstract,
the subject matter and the content and the coexistence of beauty and horror. As
he told Guernica’sReed Cooley “I’m in the sort of classic liberal trap; I’m an
essentially left wing person, making very bourgeois objects. But I do want my
paintings to engage on a very human level. It has by default become this luxury
object, but what makes me want to make art in my studio in a dingy part of East
London is that story I want to tell about our fears, our anxieties, how afraid
we all are, how we’re all going to die. Are we going to go mad? Am I going to
lose my job? Is my body going to fail? Will my loved ones not be around for me?

Often “working many weeks on
a single piece,” Mortimer builds his works appropriating images found on
the internet and in books that range from flower arranging manuals to
techniques of orthopedic surgery with the latter being influenced by his
childhood.

As he has said “I was in the
hospital myself a lot as a child; I used to wear a caliper, I was x-rayed all
the time, and I saw lots of sick children. I have memories of being in medical
machinery; it’s very frightening to a young kid: they move around and make
strange noises; doctors manipulate you. I suppose as an adult [that’s
translated to] thinking about exploitation and vulnerability. And then I’m from
a military family—my father was a helicopter pilot in the Navy when I was a
child —so I was surrounded by military hardware… my dad went off to sea
throughout my childhood. There was always a sense of ‘would he come home’—that
childhood fear. Fear became a subject—a personal fear and also a fear I have
for mankind.”

How well founded that fear
maybe, Mortimer leaves to his audience’s determination. He just set up a scene
for their interpretation, as he says “My more successful work has always been
when it looks as if something has or is about to happen.”

Mortimer’s current
exhibition Kult is on show at London’s
Parafin
Gallery until the 27th of June.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

“I believe deep down in their
hearts, everybody wants to be a prince or princess.”

Anna Berezovskaya

The
Russian artist Anna Berezovskaya paints wonderlands that
allow people to relive the magical and mysterious joys of childhood, a welcome
respite from the usual harsh realities that confront us. As she explained to the Hong Kong Magazine
“When I was little, my parents were always busy
working so I was left home alone all the time. Being an imaginative kid I loved
reading fairy tales and then started creating my own. When I became a painter,
those fantasies naturally reflected in my paintings.”

Berezovskaya comes from the
small town of Jakhroma some 60 kms north of Moscow and from the age of 17 has
had to make her own way in the world. As she has said “My parents sent me to
art school when I was nine, but they never wanted me to pursue a painting
career. I had to be self-supported when I turned 17 though, so I had no choice
but to produce paintings and sell as many as I could.”

In the ensuing eight years Berezovskaya
has become something of a darling in art world commanding prices in the five
and six figure range for her work. Work’s that present a fairy tale fantasy. As
she told Singapore’s
City Nomads “I do not portray real life; instead I portray my own
life, my own world. I offer an alternate world and try to get people to believe
in it. And my paintings are meant to be timeless.”

But like all good fairytales
there is a darker underside, a moral, perhaps, lurking under the surface. As
she told the Singapore
Art Gallery Guide about her latest exhibition “I still draw on
stories that I love from my childhood but in terms of development I realize I
have developed and grown and my ideas are becoming more interesting, sharper,
more developed. With my new seriesEdge of the WorldI
wanted to invest the works with a sense of what people value, what is worth
doing. I have done this using the style and techniques I have always used, but
perhaps with a stronger sense of symbolism and a greater awareness of my own
artistic style.”

And then there is the apocryphal
story she tells of a painting’s sale. “Once they exhibited a painting of mine
of a fat woman staring at a lot of delicious food locked in a cage. A woman
came to me and told me she would buy that painting to hang on the wall of her
daughter’s bedroom to urge her to go to diet! I had never thought my painting
could serve such a practical purpose.”

Berezovskaya’s current
exhibition Edge of the World is on show a Singapore’s Redsea Gallery
until the 14th of June.

Saturday, May 23, 2015

From
domestic tranquilities need of impressing the in-laws to the experience of being
a Muslim in a post 9/11 world, the work of the Pakistani born, London based
artist Faiza Butt’s
is unashamedly political. As she told Art Radar
“I do believe artists are social
commentators. Hardship tends to sharpen their senses. They log and document
truth and side towards fairness. They are trained to look in-between the hard
projections of right and wrong. I do have that sense of responsibility! My work
must provoke the unsaid, the truth, and make my audience think and question.
Coming from a turbulent country such as Pakistan, it is only natural for me to
be politically opinionated in my work.”

So much so that this
opinionated streak influenced the development of Butt’s style of painting
whilst a student at London’s Slade School of Fine Art. As she has said “In
the mid-nineties, the echoes from the New York art scene were still ringing
strong at the art school, with its leaders likeJackson
Pollockprojected like rock
stars who lived fast and died young! I observed that students were still very
engaged in the discussion around the physicality of oil painting as a medium. I
have always questioned the hierarchy of Western art history projected as the
[only] art history of the world and the need to reinterpret the arts of the
East…I chose to work on paper as a reaction to the physicality of canvas and
oil paint. I consider my works elaborate drawings. I observed that drawing had
a place in the hierarchical order of the painting tradition, but was considered
“preparatory” and not complete. I decided to create obsessive, embellished
drawings that rival paintings in their ambition.”

From growing up surrounded by Pakistani
Truck Art and the hand painted cinema billboards of Lahore to integrating herself
into an English, Christian family, from her reaction to the female nude in
Western art to the territorial nurture/nature aspect of childhood, all inform
Butt’s portrayal of a divided world with inspiration more often than not coming
from the mass media.

As she has explained “Photographs that are meant to influence the masses amaze
me. I must add that the creative force that affects people instantly is not art
but advertising. My initial ideas come from sources that exist outside the core
of fine art. It connects with my early inspiration coming from the visual
material that surrounded me in Lahore. Once I find a photograph that I feel can
be extended into a meaningful image, I start to spin the web of supporting
images around it, digesting the original image along the way and giving birth
to a new narrative.”

A narrative that explores
the pressing global issues of the day behind a façade of enticingly colored
images of the everyday pregnant with alternative meanings, As she told her
sister, Nadia, in an interview in Pakistan’s Friday
Times “I want to throw punches, to deliver a message without having to read
up on the background and yet my work must also contribute to the history of
painting.”

A survey exhibition of her
work Faiza Butt: Paracosm is on show at Nottingham’s New Art Exchange until the 28th
of June.

Friday, May 22, 2015

“My collages are social landscapes, theaters of form and
gestures of symbolism.”

Peter Jacobs

Every day the American artist Peter Jacobs sits down at his
kitchen table with a cup of coffee and the New York Times, but instead of a
piece of toast to complete this morning ritual, Jacobs opening trifecta is
completed with a X-Acto knife and a glue stick. Over the next two hours, Jacobs
will slice and dice The Grey Lady to create a colorful collage that re-contextualizes
the day’s news into a personalized image that reflects the edition’s mix of
truth and advertising.

As Jacobs’ wrote in the Strathmore
Artist Papers “I abstract small truths and intuitively build visual rhythms
that imbue surreal narratives that say a lot about who I am and the world we
live in.”

Jacobs’ created the first of these particular collages on
the 31st of March 2005 and has made one every day since with no foreseeable end
date in sight. As he writes “The Collage Journal has become integrated in my
daily life as a meditation, contemplation and re-evaluation of culture and
identity.”

His interest in collage predates his commencement of the
Journal by some 20 plus years to when he was studying for his BFA in
photography at Purchase College and wanted a more hands on experience. As he has
written “I loved to walk aimlessly in the city and record my responses and
perceptions. This art of seeing and capturing I embraced, but the processing
and printing became a labor and I wanted to have greater hands-on engagement in
the process of my art. Having studied color theory and figure ground, collage
was natural visual language for me. My work was constructivist at heart and
remains so to this day.”

Although Jacobs has produced and exhibited other collage
works the constant discipline of the Journal has seen it evolve from commenting
on elements of the news to a "more
painterly and formal" presentation. As he told the Montclair
Times “You don't realize you're looking at newspaper clippings."

A subject Jacobs expands upon
in the publicity for his current Huntington Art Museum exhibition, equating his
work to “a puzzle (in which) I try to create a different ending to each
time. When I start each collage, I have no idea where I’m going to end
up. . . That, to me, means I’m never compromising.”

To which he added “No one knows what the
future will bring, but I will continue to bring a new work into each day as
long as the New York Times delivers newspapers.”

His current
exhibitionPeter Jacobs: The Collage Journal -- The
First Decade is on show at New Jersey’s Huntington
Art Museum until the 6th of September.

Thursday, May 21, 2015

The Cliché is the recipient of
a lot of bad press and deservedly so, for as your English teacher was fond of
saying it “is generally considered a mark of inexperience or a lack of
originality.” A statement that is equally as true for the visual arts in
general and photography in particular.

That is until it is placed in
the hands of American photographer Tyler
Shields whose repurposing of the well worn infuses them with new meanings that
more often than not up ends the predictable meme originally expressed.

Like his Girl Running From Plane (see above) from his new photographic
series Historical Fiction,
an image that breathes new life into the poster child
of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 movie North by Northwest. About which Shields’ says “With
‘Historical Fiction,’ I have tried to create a narrative of history frozen in
time, as if each image were part of a book where the first and last 100 pages
have been torn out, and the story is for you to decipher. What happened
before and what happened after is only up to the imagination of the viewer, and
it's that viewer that can envision themselves in many of these moments.”

The 33 year old Shields is a fast rising photographic star
in his own right on America’s west coast who took his first photograph in 2003;
it was what he took away from a failed romance. As he told Elle
Magazine “I was a music video director at the time, and I had this
girlfriend who basically cheated on me with a guy who was a photographer. He
took pictures of cats and shit, you know what I mean? He just called himself a
photographer. I took all of her stuff and boxed it up. And the last things
there were two pairs of shoes and a hanger in an empty closet. So, I borrowed
my roommate's camera, took one picture and said, "Oh, when you develop the
film, it's the last picture on the roll. Just give me that." He gave it to
me, and people went crazy for it. Magic, the fashion trade show company, ended
up buying it and using it for their ad campaign. That's how I was able to buy
my first camera.”

His notoriety received a boost in 2011 when a selection of
his images was attacked for making light of domestic abuse. An accusation
Shields rejected telling The
Huffington Post"In no way were we
promoting domestic violence. We wanted to do a bruised-up Barbie [doll] shoot
and that's exactly what we did!"

Provocative and sometimes
controversial Shields work is always close to the
edge of approval, disapproval, real and unreal (although he insists they are
real - no Photoshop) and biting social commentary is never far away.

For as Shield's insists “I'm an
artist. I'm not a politician. I'll tell you exactly what I think, and I'll do
exactly what I want to do. And I'm the most honest f-cking person you'll ever
meet, because I put it out there for the whole world to see."

Shields’ current exhibition
Historical Fiction
is on show at Santa
Monica’s Andrew Weiss Gallery until the
30th of June.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

The Palestinian born New York based abstract artist Samia Halaby is very much the pragmatist. As
she told the New
York Magazine’sErica Schwiegershausen “I don’t have
patience with the postmodern philosophers because I’m a person who wants to
deal with concrete things. I believe what I see is real, and I want to paint
about it.”

Halaby also rejects the concept that art is self expression,
as she says “The stuff comes out of me, but it’s not about me. Our brain is a
storehouse of all of the things we’ve seen, and as we process them, we discern
the general principles that govern them. Abstraction, being about general
principles, can remind you of many sets of things that share the same
principles. Abstract paintings are not about specific objects.”

At the age of 12 Halaby along with her family were forced to
leave their home in Jaffa during the fighting there as part of the creation of
the state of Israel. After three years in Beirut the family moved to the
Midwestern United States. After graduated from
Indiana University with a Masters in Fine Art Halaby embarked on her
career as an artist by becoming a teacher. As she says in her biography “Teaching
was then the only way to earn money if your college degree was in the arts.”

After 18 years in exile Halaby was able to return to the
Arab world for the first time which had a marked influence upon her work that
had mostly been influence by the mid 20th Century European and American abstract
movements. As she has said “I went back in 1966 and I visited the Dome of the
Rock, which is one of the most amazing architectural monuments in the world.
It’s a mosque, and it influenced my work enormously. I saw large, very simple
marble inlays of geometric art. The inlays were at least twelve to fourteen
feet tall, and some were just a few squares arranged with a black outline.
Medieval Arabic art is very much based on symmetry: There’s a repeating pattern
with chosen parts represented in a rectangle. So I came back and decided to let
the rectangle of the painting determine what I do.”

Halaby has also been active in issues regarding the land of her
birth. As she says “I’m very much an activist for Palestine, and I’m a leftist
— the two seem to go together. The experience of
being evicted from Palestine and losing everything was a very painful one...There’s
a deep pain in every Palestinian about it, I think.”

But she doesn’t see herself as a Palestinian artist per se. “As
I see it, Palestine need not be in my painting and should not be in my
painting. If Arab art and Palestine is in some paintings, that’s because it’s
part of my past and will come through as part of my experiences in the real
world. But if I’m a painter, I should be a painter trying to do paintings that
are the most advanced possible,” she
has remarked.

Halaby’s current exhibition Painting
from the Sixties and Seventies is on show at Ayyam’s London
Gallery until the 18th of July.

Tuesday, May 19, 2015

“Jay Robinson seeks to engage the vital aesthetic
issues of his time in his art.”
Paul Manoguerra - Curator of American Art at the Georgia Museum of Art(2001 -2012)

Around the time of
his 80th birthday, the American abstract artist Jay Robinson’s studio burned to
the ground with only one of his earlier unsold works surviving. Undeterred the octogenarian artist rebuilt his studio
and continued on with his life’s work although the influence for his work
changed from an earlier interest in jazz music and the lives of his people to
his later interest in molecular
physics and constellations.

As the curator for his
current exhibition, William U. Eiland,
told ARTFIX
daily “This exhibition celebrates a long life devoted to art and things of
the spirit. The works on view literally ‘rose from the ashes’ of a terrible
studio fire, a time when the artist changed direction and rediscovered his
muse. We are fortunate, indeed, that he never despaired of art’s power to
restore and to provoke, in short, to complete life.”

Robinson had his first New
York solo exhibition in 1948, about which the New York Timesreviewer
Aline B. Louchheim is said
to have written, “[he had] a facility which allows him to move from a
simplified realism in landscaped views to an imaginative semi-abstraction for
his interpretation of jazz themes."

About these works
Robinson wrote in a 1987 letter to the collector Jason Schoen “Many times I made sketches --
mainly of the players, the surroundings of the place where they were playing,
and the instruments; but mainly it was all in my mind and memory. Then I could
compose the scene as I got to painting and let everything take a natural course
so as to be spontaneous, like the music itself."

In 1950 Robinson traveled to
Africa on Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship and upon his
return concentrated his efforts in depicting the life in his native Kentucky.
As can be seen from his 1954 painting The Coal Miner (see below) his interest in abstraction
had taken a firm hold.

About
the works from this period he has said “This
composition is not intended as a chart but as semi-description, a semi-abstract
scene of an aspect of life."And of another “It
is strictly a mood piece, trying to convey the somber mood of the hills and
people way back in."

As Paul Manoguerra wrote
about Robinson’s work from this time “His works proclaim his fundamental
concern with conveying meaning through constructive order and abstraction.
Robinson's paintings, drawings, mixed media constructions, and sculptures
reflect his instinctive feeling for his environment and enrich our experience
with the genuine aura of Africa, small Kentucky towns, and the New York jazz
scene.”

Robinson’s current, post
studio fire, works are more in touch with the cosmos although the influence of
Paul Klee is clearly evident.

Jay Robinson: Quarks, Leptons
and Peanuts exhibition
is currently on show at the Georgia
Museum of Art until the 21st of June.

Monday, May 18, 2015

“Art was the tranquil place where
I always lost myself for hours at a time.”

Veronica Dyer

There is a certain cool detachment in the abstract expressionist
work of Venezuelan born artist Veronica Dyer. Unlike the fire in the
belly energy of Pollock or the dramatic angst of Rothko, Dyer's works have a
contemplative demeanor an almost “stop and smell the roses” vibe. As she says
on her website "Layer by layer,
minute by minute, hour by hour, day after day - with palettes, knife, brushes,
sponges, spatulas, my hands - I uncover thoughts emotions and freedom in my
paintings."

For the last 14 years Dyer has been living the
good life in the sun drenched Texas capital, Houston, and it shows in both her
palette and subject matter. From the warm grays offset by the sun burnt greens
of the verge in A Day of Cycling (see above) to the overall warm rendering of her
portrait of Carlotta (see below).

The inclusion of recognizable portraits in her oeuvre,
of which there are many, further distances Dyer from the abstract expressionists
of the 1950’s and 60’s.

Dyer received her early instruction in painting
from her grandfather, the figurative Italian artist Nerino de Panfilis, at the
age of 13 in Venezuela. And whilst she developed her own freer style, figurative
impulses still often intrude into her work.

As Dyer says “It is the constant progression of a
piece that excites me - the changes, the challenges and the accidents too. From
that comes my enjoyment and fulfillment, seeing and feeling the canvas acquire
its own life, an expression of the intangible coming from all the realms of my
experience.

Dyer’s current exhibition Cement, Screen and Sun,
which includes the use of found objects from construction sites, is on show at
Houston’s Archway Gallery until the
4th of June.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

In his essay The Art of Alex Katz the Telegraph Newspaper’sMartin Gayford said of Katz “He is to
designer shades what Claude Monet was to garden ponds.” An opinion
underscored by the Nassau County Museum’s director, Karl
E. Willers, who in a catalogue essay, described Katz’s style as “suave,
sophisticated, polished, refined, cultured, stylish.”

Except for
their lack of narrative and a search for his own voice in relation to what had
gone before Katz’s works could be classified as illustrations rather than fine
art. But as he told The Brooklyn
Rail in a conversation with David sale “There are some things other
people painted very well and they don’t have to be painted over again by me.
Matisse’s interiors, Picasso’s still lifes, Picasso’s solid form. They’ve all
been done. And one thing I don’t want to do is things already done. As for
particular subject matter, I don’t like narratives, basically.”

With a mix of
figurative and land/cityscape works to his credit, Katz divides his time exclusively
between New York City and the Maine countryside maintaining a style that does
both genres justice. As he told the Brooklyn
Rail in a 2009 interview “I think you have to be adaptable to your
surroundings. It’s a way to step outside of yourself, which can be very
generative. Whatever I do in my paintings has to do with a good deal of my time
looking at everything every day. I look at a lot of other artists’ works—young
and old. I even like looking at bad art because it can be more interesting than
boring art. Maybe spending every summer in Maine with Ada, where I paint from
nature, gives me fresh insight when I come back to the city. It’s a perfect
balance for me. The bottom line about the way I think of style is that it has
sustaining power.”

Katz builds his
large, often billboard sized, paintings from quickly executed small initial
paintings. As he says “I would paint a little painting from the little
paintings. From there I would paint at 4 × 6 feet, and if it looked right, I
would move up to 5 × 7 feet. And if I felt I had it, I then go right up to the
big ones.”

The initial
land and cityscapes are completed in 15 minutes whereas the initial sitting for
a portrait would be an hour. And with over 200 renderings, his wife, Ada, is a favored
subject. “She’s basically an American beauty. Ada for me is like Dora Maar to
Picasso. But Ada has better shoulders, and could easily be Miss America. I was
interested in Miss America because it’s an icon in popular culture, so she just
fits right in,” Katz has said.

A self titled
exhibition of Alex Katz’s work is currently on show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise’s
Greenwich Street gallery in New York until the 13th of June.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Michael Govan the director of
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art told W
Magazine in 2012 “No other artist has pursued color and form as
relentlessly and purely as Ellsworth.”

Whilst color is an essential
ingredient in the work of American painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly, it is
the artist’s use of the line that defines his forms and as he told Gwyneth Paltrow
in her Interview
Magazine chat with the artist “I don’t like shading. Just the line. As I
say, the line is the excuse. And it’s fast. It’s always fast.”

A facet that reveals itself
in his wood sculptures which also underscores his fascination with nature, as
he said, “I wanted to do as little as possible to the wood. So
there’s this wonderful curve. When you’re standing in front of it, the curve is
swift. The eye takes it in in a second.
But the marks on the wood took a hundred years or more to be made. The marks
are a given. The swiftness of the curve versus the marks that took so long to
be made—I love it”

Because it is Kelly’s use of
observed reality to inform his abstraction that has distinguished him from many
of his contemporaries. As he says “I keep investigating how the sun hits a
building and the shadow that appears with it or the look of a field of bright
green, the curve of green. I’m constantly investigating nature—nature, meaning
everything.”

It was in Paris in
the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, after leaving the US Army’s camouflage unit, that
Kelly started to develop his abstraction from nature along with his multi panel
painting format. As he reclled “I
didn’t come back from Europe until I was 30, and by then I already figured out
my style of painting. In France, they thought I was too American. And when I
came back, people said, “You’re too French.” I just stuck to my guns and
continued painting. I thought I had something really important that came to me
in France. That was hard, though, because it was right at the moment of the
breakthrough of the Abstract Expressionists.”

When minimalism and color
field painting began to take over from Abstract Expressionism in the 1960’s
Kelly’s work became more fashionable and whilst not being that closely aligned
with the new movements the public acceptance of his work has gone from strength
to strength.

It is perhaps best explained by
Michael Goven’s reaction at the inclusion of a Kelly sculpture in an exhibition
of Assyrian relief sculptures at Williams College. “I was looking at
these thousands-of-years-old sculptures, and there was Ellsworth Kelly’s simple
form—and they stood up to each other perfectly.” He recalled. “I didn’t know
what I was more impressed by—that Ellsworth Kelly could live up to the
standards of ancient art or that the ancient art still seemed current.”

Kelly’s latest sculptures and
paintings are currently on show at all four of Matthew
Marks Gallery spaces in New York until the 20th of June. Kelly passed away Sunday 27 December 2015.

Friday, May 15, 2015

In his youth the
Colombian abstract artist Carlos
Rojas was so frustrated by the insubstantial answers to his philosophical and
metaphysical questions that he abandoned the seminary where he was studying to
pursue the answers for himself. And it became an eclectic life long journey embracing
not only the visual arts but
music, architecture, handicrafts, design, technology, science, mathematics and
nature, as well as the mystical, of which his art works are his diary.

As he has said, “That which I study, analyze and compare yields some
common denominators, which, when agglomerated, give rise to a result, and the
result is the artwork.”Such were Rojas’ lines of enquiry that abstraction in its
various forms was the best vehicle for his expression, “For me, abstraction is the simplification of elements
starting out from a complex naturalist whole,” he has stated.

In their publicity for Rojas’
2014 retrospective exhibition the El Museo Galeria quoted several of his
remarks about his work showing the diversity of his investigations, which
included “One day, I suddenly
discovered that when my mother gets dressed, she uses a corset. Those garments
and bras with terrible shapes that in some way, for me evoked horse tack:
cinches, horse blankets, buckles…The colors obey emotional states rather
than physical realities. I mean, if I’m talking about landscape – place, I’m
proposing a completely personal phenomenon regarding the temperature, the
season; a series of variables that comprise the landscape…That is to
say, the horizon of the land and the vertical of man, of the overwhelming
spirit of a vertical self. On the other hand, it arose from managing life in
two opposite directions: the pursuit and denial of a goal…The myth of El
Dorado was simply an expression of this need to have greater possession of America:
the intellectual power, the power of gold, to mark power over the world, but
the American man is in search of his roots and differences…Being part of the
essential element of man’s existence, which is his own inner and physical
nature. These two combinations produce abstraction and the concrete in the art
of human production. So, I think that in this work, you are going to find more
psychological and mental, almost metaphysical, associations with nature, with
an essential geometric idea.”

For it was the exploration
of the metaphysical that sustained Rojas journey. As art
agenda reported him as saying, “This is what I call religion: to
fight for a purpose, even if the purpose does not exist, even if one knows that it does not exist. What I intend with that absolute perfection is the order par excellence, I don’t care if it exists or not. The sole fact of fighting for it is, in itself, perfection”

New York’s Nohra Haime Gallery is currently showingCarlos Rojas:A Retrospective Exhibitionwhich is on view until the 20th of June.

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The expat

Henry Bateman is an artist and writer currently living in Australia, a return home after living in the Philippines for 10 years. The Ex Expat, is his blog about the arts (often) and politics (sometimes).
His writing has been published by Crikey.com (Australia), Artslant (US), The Expat Travel & Lifestyle Magazine & The Expat Newspaper (both in the Philippines) and The Western Review (Australia).
He has also had seven solo exhibitions and has had his work shown in 15 group exhibitions as well as 35 theater commissions as a set designer and/or lighting designer.